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Lotus Notes For Linux To Be Released By IBM
gamigad writes "According to ZDNet, Lotus Notes 7.0.1 will be released for Linux. Availability is expected to be on July 24.
It ain't gonna be a free lunch, tho" It's going to be based mainly on the Eclipse framework, and it does appear that you'll be able to swap a Linux version for a Windows or Mac version if you so choose.
One less reason to use Windows for those who need/want Lotus.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
http://edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/hannovers creenshots.html
From the summary:
I don't this will be a blocking issue for the people who choose to deploy notes. I am very glad I don't have to use it any more.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
This comes severely late, in my opinion. The Wine and the CodeWeavers people have put work into running Notes on Linux.
IMHO, it would've been better if IBM had put this investment into Wine so other applications had profited as well. A proper native compilation along with some polishing for the various desktops could've made this "achievement" years earlier. Think Google's Picasa, which was nicely ported to Linux this way, and runs like a charm.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
I hate Notes. Its my absolute, all time, most hated application (for any OS). It has the most mega-goofy, non-intutive interface and requires gigabytes of RAM just to start itself.
Run from this, Linux, run very fast and very far or Notes will never let you run again. Aieeeeee!
Let me just be the first to say...
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!
Okay, now I feel better.
B
"We must still have chaos within in order to be able to give birth to a dancing star." --Friedrich Nietzsche
since a lot of Companies have refused to switch to Linux because of the perceived lack of software in this type of area.
I know of several IT Department heads for Fortune 500 Companies that have asked for software that matches MS Echange / Lotus Notes for Linux before they would concider switching to Linux desktops.
This is also the first step in IBM actually putting their product line behind their public stand of supporting open source operating systems, not just their money into open source projects.
The biggest drawback is the eclipse framework. Eclipse's java requires sun's jvm which conflicts with gjc. Open Office requires gjc in linux for 100% functionality, sun's jvm won't cut it.
J. Henager: If the average user can put a CD in and boot the system and follow the prompts, he can install and use Linux
While I've been forced to use Notes on Windows in some of my gigs, I'd prefer to still use PINE, thank you very much. This isn't a piece of software I would *choose* to use, but something I might use rather than having a an additional machine just to run Windows and Notes. Note: I am a unix systems administrator.
Notes is well known for its 'unique' interface. too much repetition? Why does this post have too much repetition?
Zhrodague.net - I do projects and stuff too.
I am speculating here, but I think this might have big consequences inside ... IBM.
AFAIK, Notes was the single big piece missing to allow desktop transition to Linux inside IBM. I would bet that the more geeky IBM employees that were stuck on Windows because of Notes will change.
And maybe in the future the company will encorage this.
If you consider the sheer size of IBM its no small deal for Linux deskop usage...
Just speculating though... Is there any IBMer wanting to comment?
Linux-based systems already have browsers that can run this.
"If I were to ask you a hypothetical question, what would you like it to be about?"
I was a Lotus Notes administrator for Duke University - and even though I can see how at first glance the end user and IT admin would hate it - I don't I really like it actually. Great account management and features. It's all proprietary, but I think Notes is a great technology, and now runs on more platforms than Exchange.
It represents a decent answer to the "oops, someone stole my laptop at the airport" problem in that it offers both a quick recovery process and some protection that the stealers should not get at your data.
I'll be very curious as to what happens with respect to document management, whether they'll be supporting OpenOffice.org, or if there's either some other strategy (SmartSuite for Linux???), or a lack of strategy...
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
Concur. Anyone who has been forced (and hopefully few have volunteered) to administer lotes shudders at the thought of it. It was the worst adminning experience I've ever had....
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
This is good news. The Microsoft front-line is getting a battering from all sides at the moment, while the Nix parties are getting stronger with more support by the day. And Lotus Notes can only reinforce that position against the Vole.
Yeah....Lotus Domino has run on Linux for a Loooooooong time, so all that was missing was the client. Great, now more people will be using it...job security for you Notes admins, I guess.
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
It's really a development platform, more akin to MS Access on LSD.
Both have since been largely superceeded by web based apps.
Deleted
I don't like it either but the alternative where I work now is SMB, email, word, visio and explorer. Notes has the right idea of delivering a unified environment for documents. Its a shame that the UI is pretty bad and poor reliability tends to give it a bad name.
OTH the OS it ran on (OS/2 then window98 back when I used it) gave it a really bad name. Perhaps deployments on Linux will be a genuine exchange killer.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
You do realise you can have multiple jres installed? Just don't install them as the system default java. I would actually guess that Notes will come with its own copy of the jre which will not affect anything else at all.
Lotus for Linux: at least ten years too late, and it is not even open source. We are supposed to go in convulsions over it?
Paai
ot:
can someone recommend a free alternative to windows media center?
thanks-
rob the knob
The core concepts of Notes is great, however, the platform sucks.
Of LotusScript, @Functions and Java, only @Functions are fast and stable; but they can't be used in many cases (such as many web contexts).
If it wasn't for the many apps written in Notes that can't be ported easily, it would be a stone dead platform. IBM's successor IBM Workplace is an even worse pile of bull crap, because of that Notes will live on as long as the apps aren't rewritten for something better than LWP.
Hanover actually _looks_ a lot better than the old Notes, I guess there might come some improvements in the Notes user community's way. But considering how bad all IBM software is, I guess it will be worse than the previous version in everything but looks.
So my question is, except for the mainframes and the like (zSeries and iSerives), what does IBM produce that isn't complete crap? I have to work/develop for their software daily and Notes is the best platform they have, which says a lot.
The Notes client isn't free or Free (although many applications that run on it are - see openntf.org) however if you have a client license for Windows or Mac then you can use it on Linux at no additional cost. In fact the licensing is per person, if you have a Windows machine, a Mac and a Linux box or three then you can use your Notes ID on all of them at once if you like. If you are using Notes already, then moving the desktop operating system to Linux is most certainly a free lunch.
While I've been forced to use PINE in some of my gigs, I'd prefer to still stick an RJ-45 plug on my tongue and manually read the data stream, thank you very much. PINE isn't a piece of software I would *choose* to use, but something I might use rather than having to constantly fill my mouth with cable. Note: I am a unix systems administrator.
I'm more excited about moving Notes to the Eclipse framework rather than the aspect of Linux support. Not that Linux support isn't important, but moving to Eclipse is going to mean that the general usability of Notes is going to get better for everyone regardless of the platform that they're on.
Hell, as someone that has to use Notes, I'm salivating just at the prospect of the better view/window management that Eclipse provides. Eclipse is an extremely flexible and customizeable framework, and the lack of such customizeablity has been hurting the usability of Notes for a long time. "What do you mean the preview pane is fixed to be at the bottom of the screen? You mean I can't dock it at the right? ARRRRRGH!". Etc.
If the people on Notes start following the Eclipse Way (TM), things will only get better from here.
Mechanik
Quite a prolific blogger, and very good at it too, his blog is at http://www.edbrill.com/ and he talks about this announcement here http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/notes -on-linux-announcement?opendocument&comments
Say what you will about Notes/Domino, but it is a very powerful platform than most realize. I look forward to the MS-Exchange vs. Notes/Domino wars. Thus Linux (and OS X) become more available platforms in many corporate settings which is good for everyone. And please remember, when you 'dis' Notes/Domino, you 'dis' some highly-intelligent programmers at Lotus/IBM who probably make you look like a script kiddie! I can't wait to see the evolution when Notes/Domino 8.0 arrives on the scene..I think MS is going to feel more heat from the competition.
There's a reason I leave my experience with Lotus Notes off of my Resume.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
Good god man, if you are only using it for email then you are wasting space. Lotus Notes is for COLLABORATION! It allows you to create workflow apps which are truly quite impressive. Something I have not seen done with SharePoint or anything else. The security and encryption features are impressive. I'm not a huge fan of Lotus Notes but I can seen the advantages.
Bottom line it comes down to what you are trying to do.
I work at a place that is in the process of migrating from a Windows platform to a Linux platform for their Lotus Notes 6.5.5 environment. The problem with Notes on Windows is that Windows is unstable. The problem with Notes on Linux is Notes becomes unstable. There are also all sorts of Gotcha's... like the way backups work. Administrative rights are funky too.
A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the tongue you may never get over. -Benjamin Franklin
The mac client was resource hungry and sluggish.
Lets hope Notes 7 is an improvement over 6.x for any other platform than Windows...
Our company moved away from Domino and onto Exchange 12 months ago and it has allowed Mac enthusiasts to run Entourage 2004 which totally rocks under the Mac. The new service pack delivers native Exchange/AD/GAL in Entourage which was a welcome change.
Other eclipse plugins which my work exploits requires that JDK and it's quite easy to set up. Eclipse even has facilities to configure multiple JDKs and to easily switch between them.
Blar.
i have to use it for more that email because of work, and i actually am aware of some of this other 'features' besides email. i still find it to be totally unintuative and ikky. i would never use it myself for just an emil client. i might be crazy, but not insane.
Given the spaghetti already under the hood of the Notes client (saving ("detaching") a single attachment and saving multiple attachments seem to go through different APIs, and open dialog boxes in two different toolkits), I wonder whether "based on the Eclipse open-source framework" will be an improvement or just an even worse nightmare.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Since version 6.5 (now it's at 7.0.1) Novell Gropwise runs natively on Linux clients and servers and IMHO is more refined than Lotus as groupware suite. Of course Lotus Notes is much more than a groupware suite, but I wonder how many companies use it as application framework or document database.
..and have been on design review teams and other sorts of preview programs for the "Hannover" release which is the thing that generated the work itself. This isn't Hannover (which is Notes/Domino v8) but it stems from that work.
What most people don't know is that Notes was always built to be ported. It is MOSTLY portable code. Only the user interface calls themselves -- which have always been kept apart from the rest of the code -- is platform specific. This concept of a "Separation Layer" has been in the server and client since the earliest days of the product back in the early 90's. The UI port to run within the Eclipse framework (which IBM has been a huge part of) was much easier than anyone expected.
The best news -- for those who run the product anyway -- is that this isn't a "Port" or a "reworking" of the code. This is the same secure, stable, code. It's not just "compatible" its the actual code so there won't be problems of compatibility between versions running on different operating systems. The only potential issue will be that locally stored applications will be case sensitive on Linux but not on other platforms. Sloppy programming practices then will be highlighted if users run local applications that haven't been tested on a case sensitive operating system. This has long been true on the server side.
You may or may not like the product -- that has no value in this discussion. About 120 million people use it every day, and for those people one major barrier to moving toward a linux workstation has been lifted.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
While I can see this as one more reason not to be tied to Windows, TBH I'd rather tell my boss that no, Notes simply won't work on Linux, so in the process of migrating we will simply have to use something ... ANYTHING ... else. ;)
Unpleasantries.
"One less reason to use Windows for those who need/want Lotus."
You expect organizations that STILL have not gotten rid of Notes to ditch Windows????
This is true. But the client is evolwing. See the next Notes version that allows you to have the preview pane to the right: http://www-142.ibm.com/software/sw-lotus/products/ product4.nsf/wdocs/hannover
If its a general improvment to the notes environment, or only to the mail application remains to be seen.
> It allows you to create workflow apps which are truly quite impressive.
and nightmares in terms of maintenance, scalability and data quality.
Honestly, every one of these things I run into is a catastrophe. I'm sure that they were better than the manual processes that they usually replace, but I wish that they could have been implemented in php & postgresql/db2/oracle/whatever.
ah, and did I mention usability? Notes has its own usability patterns - which are different from everything else. The client has millions of configuration parameters - that are distributed in an arbitrary fashion across dozens of overlapping menus.
Teamrooms? ick, we've been moving that stuff to wikis for years. Yep, even the documents - go into our wiki as attachments, and yes we can lock down the security.
It's too bad though - if the right people (just a few with a vision and real experience), the right processes (probably 2% of what they're actually buried under), and the right budget had all intersected about 5 years ago this could be a good product today. But now it's just a nightmare.
And sure, running on linux is good. But accessing my notes from Thunderbird would be *far* better.
...I think this is more than six years late.
By now, the web has matured to such an extent that there really aren't many reasons anymore to keep using fat (Notes) clients, and currently I see more projects migrating away from Notes than towards it.
Also, over six years ago a Linux version was mentioned, and when it came out it was only the Domino server. And this time? Will IBM release both user-client and development-client, or will developers be left in the cold again?
That said, some of the aspects of Notes development are sheer genius (it is really easy to whip up a quick form-driven database). Other aspects plain suck (manually guarantee relational integrity/too slow).
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
The points made in this post are quite valid. Lotus Notes is more stable than most appreciate. And like most things, the good 'ole 80/20 rule applies here in terms of who is using the majority of the features.
I'll also say this; the collective clamoring for a 'native' Notes client for Linux has finally risen to a loud enough point that this product release is imminent. I've been using Notes running on wine for about 2 years now, and this will blow that setup out of the water.
Also, I found an IBM PDF article about the 7.0.2 code release, if anyone is interested.
Comparing Notes to Exchange is like comparing rhino shit to rabbit shit. Sure you can do a heck of a lot more with the rhino shit, but in the end it's all just shit.
But the companies that rely on groupware have no choice but to build with this shit because groupware technology is still living in the "Shit Ages". So they're building houses of shit, since wood, stone, brick, and steel have yet to be discovered.
So the moral of my disgusting analogy is that somebody really needs to put some development effort into moving groupware forward.
So we can stop relying on shit.
since Linux users are to used to crappy user interfaces.
> This is the same secure, stable, code.
Are you on fucking CRACK? Have you EVER actually run the product? It's the buggiest, most bloated, badly designed piece of shit I've ever had the misfortune to see.
All of you who are excited about this for some reason, let me reassure you that the beta testers I talked to who'd seen this were *screaming* in pain.
Just when you thought Notes couldn't *possibly* be any slower, buggier or more bloated, they did this to it. It's horrendous. Fortunately I've left IBM and won't have to deal with their crap any more, but I weep for the friends I left there.
I don't know what the hell that team is on, but they seem to be totally out of touch with reality, other human beings, and any semblence of an interface design team.
Lotus has been releasing a trickle of notes tools etc, some based on java over the last several years that have been based on fresh code. One can hope, especially if they're supporting linux, that this is a new code base, as well.
Lotus Notes (6.5.x) worked fine under WINE, until you started drag & dropping messages in folders. Then it because completly unstable.
:-(
In the end I had to move to a VMware Workstation solution to keep using Notes under Linux.
I've been waiting for a native version for years. It's about time
The "Hannover" Release, scheduled to come out next year is built upon the Rich Client framework IBM built using Eclipse as the foundation. The 7.X release is the current version. Windows, Linux, and Mac was part of the client release plan for Hannover, but this gets a native Linux client out long before than. Along with the Mac client coming in 7.0.2 later this summer, that gives people 3 client platforms to choose from.
What about a GPL Notes client, so people wanting to deliver "Web" services from Notes servers can use or research the client code necessary to connect?
--
make install -not war
The Notes/Domino vs. Outlook/Exchange wars happened almost 10 years ago. MS was really gung-ho about how Outlook/Exhchange was going to kill Notes/Domino. I was watching it closely as we expected we would start offering development services under Exchange to complement our Domino work. After about a year of heavy hype, MS decided it was better to ignore Domino than to point out to people that they were unsuccessfully playing catch up.
Now we know why IBM is so in favor of Linux, open source, open document format, etc, so they can sell expensive software and services! Amazing how everyone writes about 'IBM the good', but looks the other way when it comes to really understanding their motivations here. We use to be a big 'all blue' company, but we've moved most of it out, including two zseries mainframes, and are going with linux, freebsd and windows stuff. Screw IBM, they'll try to drive IGS down your throat - trust me.
but if it is "web services" you want which is the XML passing thing with WSDL and so on then Notes does support that natively, you can add web services design elements to applications for consumers to consume. If you want to know more about NRPC which is the native Notes protocol over port 1352 then that is pretty well documented already. It is a decent enough protocol, but perhaps a bit dated now. The fashion these days is for bloated XML based protocols which then get compressed for transit rather than tight efficient binary protocols which can also get compressed and encrypted. GPL Notes client really isn't going to happen from IBM, however check out CouchDB which is being developed by Damien Katz, a former IBM developer who wrote the new formula language engine.http://damienkatz.net/
I know that Codeweavers add some of their own stuff in, but it was my understanding that all of their code eventually made its way back to WineHQ.
http://www-306.ibm.com/software/swnews/swnews.nsf/ n/nhan6dbjwg
On the other hand, Lotus Notes has a long-standing and well-deserved reputation for being a buggy piece of shit. Does any platform really deserve having Notes inflicted upon it?
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AMEN, BROTHER!!!
There are not words in the English language to describe how much I am in utter comtempt for Lotus Notes. I once composed a three-page list of ways in which Lotus Notes sucks. Most of it was a list of client bugs and inconsistencies, because I didn't have much experience with the server itslef.
Later, I tried developing a simple agent that would compose an e-mail, taking information from fields stored elsewhere, and sending it out to a list of people. I never could get the damned thing to work. (Too long to explain here.) To this day, I'll write code in javascript, php, VB, C#, perl, whatever. But I refuse to touch Lotus Notes. Period. Even the most trivial of tasks are insanely complicated. (Okay, to be fair, I won't write Gimp scripts in Scheme, either.)
I'm sorry, and I am not a Microsoft lackey, but I'd take Exchange/Outlook over Notes any day. I'd rather use GMail as a corporate communications solution than Lotus Notes. Hell, I'd rather use yellow sticky notes on monitors than Lotus Notes!
As for the server, our entire Notes infrastructure has to be rebooted once a week at my company. (A very large MNC...) Once a frickin' week! No other application has that requirement. If SAP told us, "Yeah, and you'll have to reboot the SAP servers every Sunday night," we'd have their heads on a plate. But for some weird reason, Notes (which is just as critical to our business) gets away with it. Half the servers usually don't come back up without intervention, and our wonderful Notes server crew doesn't actually bother to check, so our operations center has to call them. Plus, we're constantly having to deal with mail servers crashing in the middle of the day, and the only explanations we get are, "It's a Notes thing. It just glitches like that sometimes." As you can tell, I have no particular fondness for our Notes support team, but they're not unique. I've worked at two other companies that use Lotus Notes, and the exact same thing happens at every one of them.
And to the "It's not really an e-mail system, it's a collaborative database application development environment..." people out there, go to hell. No, it's not. There's no such thing as a "flat database." It's called a frickin' table, and it's useless. If it were relational, maaaybe. But then if it were relational, I still wouldn't be using it, I'd be using Oracle, or MySQL, PostgreSQL, even MS SQL Server. You know, something competent.
So it's an awful e-mail system, it's an awful development environment, it's an awful database system. Let's see, that leaves... oh right. NOTHING. Lotus Notes has absolutely no useful value whatsoever. Q.E.D. Companies that use it (speaking from experience) are using it not because it's the best solution to their needs, but because they've invested a lot of money in it. (Which, by the way is STUPID. They're ignoring the cost going forward, which is the only relevant factor that should be considered!) If IBM really had their customers' best interest in mind, they would simply send out letters to everyone saying, "We're sorry, but in six months, we're going to stop supporting all version of Lotus Notes and never release another." Maybe even open-source the code so that maybe competent people can maybe turn it into something semi-useful.
I was after this when I first joined IBM over 10 years ago. More than 5 years ago I left IBM since they talked the (Linux) talk but couldn't deliver. Not on server support, not on application support, not on laptop support, not on desktop support.
I will not use Notes for a long time to come:
- I hate it anyway (too many reasons to list)
- the fact that they've spent this long before releasing it (there was an AIX port 10 years ago) puts it on my blacklist for at least the next 10 years.
IBM could have released something many, many years ago, beit a semi-supported port from AIX or a semi-supported Wine port. But no, empty promises for so many years.
They won't listen to their customers so I won't be one.
What asshat moderated this as a troll? It's spot on. Actually I can count at least three different widget sets in Notes. Probably four if I looked hard enough.
Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
Woudl be interesting to knwo whay you did not get your agent to work.
LotusScript is almost identical to VB, so with yoru VB experience, it should not been that hard.
I been writing that kind of agents, never had any problems.
Just remember that if you send the mail to multiple people, you need to store the values into the SendTo field as an array of names, to create a multi-value field. But that is basic common sense, I am sure you did that.
Nothing else in your description sounds like it would cause any problems.
You can store Notes data in other formats that the default NSF. Try DB2 for example. But for simple applications, if it is document centric, NSF is a better choice.
At $WORKPLACE, a $350M+ insurance company, we built a claim system from scratch in Lotus Notes. It currently handle about 30K claims, 75K claimants, financial transactions, timesheet entries, etc. Total database size is about 2 million records, split over 9 different branches, each has a local server with a filtered replica of only their data. Secority means that no unauthorized access is possible, etc.
We had auditors come in, even other insurance companies, and when they looked at the system, they were impressed and asked how many developers we had. When they heard only one, and one project manager (spending less than 50% of the time on this project), and that we rolled it out in 11 months from first line of code to production, the were even more impressed. The system involves workflow, communication with a legacy backend system written in Visual FoxPro to retrieve policy information, etc. Several of the companies spent 4-5 years, with a team of 10-15 developers, to a cost of tens of millions, without ending up witha workable solution.
So Notes can be very powerful, if you know what you are doing, and understand the platform and it's strengths and limitations.
If you only use Notes for mail, stick with Outlook, Thunderbird, or any other mail client that support POP, IMAP or direct connection to Domino (like Outlook), or why not just use the iNotes webmail?
yeah, found another great colabration feature just the other day
turns out if you accept an invite to a recurring meeting and then later you delete that email, Notes kindly removes all occurances of the meeting (and doesn't bother you by saying it'll do so).
Look out for KillNotes - only way we can kill a crashed Notes session without having to reboot.
---
We spoke for about a half an hour. I don't recall a thing we said. - Colorblind James Experience
S http://meanbusiness.com/
I hate Notes. Its my absolute, all time, most hated application (for any OS). It has the most mega-goofy, non-intutive interface and requires gigabytes of RAM just to start itself.
You've obviously never had to use SAP.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
> As for the server, our entire Notes infrastructure has to be rebooted once a week at my company. (A very large MNC...) Once a frickin' week!
I'm sorry you were unable to keep Notes running. I despise the Notes client with a passion, but our company with over 20,000 employees never ever ever had Notes go down except for failing disks, and even that just meant that synced stuff was a little slower while it hit the next replica. Notes is a freaking tank (unfortunately about as agile as one).
I've no doubt that your infrastructure's failures were probably hell to diagnose though -- it's about as hard to fix in the field as a tank too.
The notes server isn't bad - its fast, easy to configure and administer and runs on everything (I've even seen it running on mainframes). IBM should license the users at the server (which they do), and provide linux/windows libraries to connect to the server. The Notes Client is obselete by 10 years at least, clunky non-standard graphical interface, slow, heavy resource use, prone to crashes etc.
Its time for IBM to let Evolution and the other great mail clients out there to talk to Notes - Release the access library as closed source if you must, or open source it, either way let people write there OWN client.
Even better,
1 Receive meeting invite
2 Decline meeting
3 Meeting update is sent
4 You receive no update even though you are still on the Recipient List
Gavin
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
Why would you want an update to a meeting that you aren't going to?
Can you contact me at mkolus (at) gmail (dot) com? :(
No, im not a lotus exec... just someone who may suffer it in the near future
You got to give him secure.
But stable? Come on. Lotus has, on their website, a program called "Kill Notes" (or something similar) because when Lotus Notes crashes (and it does, about every couple of hours) it leaves behind ghost processes and won't restart itself until those processes are killed. The code is bloated beyond belief, the user interface is a crime against users.
Comment of the year
Except IBM *sells* it as a mail solution. And it's TERRIBLE as a mail solution.
For mail, use Outlook... it might be bad, but it's leaps and bounds better than Notes. For everyone else, use either web-apps or Filemaker. Nobody should be using Notes for anything.
Comment of the year
http://www.team-mediaportal.com/
I don't have time to deal with all your problems, but I'd like to make a point about reliability...
Restarting your Domino servers once a week is not right. Domino doesn't require that. That needs to be looked at.
So - do you actually know why they require restarts?
It might not be Domino.
Seriously.
I manage a number of Domino servers in my job. Some of them have to be restarted at least once a month, often because they've begun to degrade massively in their performance - or worse, they've crashed.
The other servers are fine, and will run for months before they get restarted - and they're restarted because of OS patches or other maintenance, not because of problems on the Domino server.
Why is this? Well, one word - McAfee's Groupshield. The servers which run it require careful care and occasional kicking. The servers that don't need Groupshield on them don't have it, because it's a PITA which causes us grief.
We'd like to move away from Groupshield, but it requires lots of evaluation/testing/piloting, and we have other projects to be getting on with.
And don't think I'm singling out Groupshield. I've seen some abysmal backup programs, content security programs, and other third party add-ins in my time. Don't even think about mentioning ArcServe, for instance. Basically, lots of 3rd party software talks to Notes/Domino via the C/C++/COM/Java APIs it exposes - and not all of them are particularly well written.
Your experience with the Domino servers is not typical of others. There may be a specific cause for that - if not technical, then management or procedural. But I do find it very difficult to give your grievances ANY credit when you espouse rubbish like this that can so easily be explained, yet is related with so few details that it is difficult for anyone to easily check the facts.
Ah, good ol' Kill Notes.
You seem to be misinformed. Yes, there's a program called Kill Notes. I've had Notes crash on me a few times - usually when I'm doing something very intensive - and not needed to run Kill Notes to get back up and running.
In fact, the need for Kill Notes is overstated.
But these "ghost tasks" - what the hell are you on about? What kind of technical term is that? What kind of ghosts are these? Is Elvis living inside my computer every time Notes crashes? If so, can I get my laptop a recording contract?
Allow me to explain. There are no such things as ghost tasks. There is, however, a solid architecture behind Notes. It has a UI side, and a backend side. The backend side does things like run agents, replicate data, and so forth. Sometimes, one of those tasks is active when the UI tanks. When Notes tries to start again, it finds that the background tasks have some files open that it wants, so won't start.
Annoying, I know. But then again, isn't this kind of architecture familiar? Where else do we often see background tasks that do the real work, simply being called by a UI? Could it be... UNIX? Yes, it could. UNIX was a major influence on the architecture of Notes - which is far more modular than you might suspect, and this has helped it adapt and change with the times very well. More so on the server side than the client side, I'll admit - SMTP/POP3/IMAP4/HTTP were just new modules written to run on the server, rather than being new functions in a monolithic program.
Anyway, we'd all like to see Kill Notes be unnecessary. As this Linux client is a port of the C/C++ code for Windows, I'd guess that there will need to be a port of Kill Notes as well. That's annoying, but if we want to be able to run agents locally and replicate in the background, then it's the price we'll have to pay...
Weird. Your opening comment shows you know that Notes is more than just email, yet you close by saying that you'd like to replace Notes with just a mail client.
OK, hotshot. What makes you think that Notes applications are nightmares in terms of maintenance? And quantify your concerns on scalability, please. Data quality? In what sense?
Bad applications can be written in any environment. VB has a terrible name in the industry, and we've all seen huge, bloated, unstable, nasty VB applications. But then again, VB has also been used very effectively by some. It's not the paintbrush, it's the artist - or so I hear.
Personally, I've seen Notes applications which took hundreds of thousands of records a week, sorted and sifted them, and then farmed them out around the world. The replication engine made that last part easy. That sounds like scalability to me - afforded by distributing the processing load worldwide, naturally.
Maintenance? Easy, because you have no DB schema to care about. Changes are much easier for the developer to handle, and don't require hours of extensive database maintenance - they're pretty much just a form change and perhaps a cleanup agent to remove any "retired" fields. Not only do I not see a maintenance nightmare, but I actually see a clear advantage.
Data quality? You've lost me. You're not one of those weird people who thinks all data should be relational, are you? I've never understood that. Some data and working processes lends themselves well to relational schemas. But most just don't. It's a restricting, cumbersome, maintenance intensive abstraction which is often unnecessary and just used out of habit. Microsoft tried for years to get a relational database backend to the way we store data - it was called WinFS, and failed despite their massive resources. And just about everything it promised me was something I could already do with a Notes Document Database - which is a standard template design that has shipped with Notes for at least ten years.
Usbaility on the client is a problem, yes. No getting around that. There's this odd catch-22 - IBM want to improve that. They really do. But for all you might say about it, there are lots of people in the workforce that are still a little afraid of computers, but that have learnt to use Notes. IBM know that a sudden change will not go down well with those users - so they want to minimise the shock. After all, you'd have to be mad to suddenly make massive UI changes to a familiar program like, say, a Word processor. Most corporations would go nuts at the training costs alone, and refuse to upgrade - surely?
Usability has improved, and will continue to do so. But it will be a more gradual shift than many would like, simply so that everyone is brought along.
I'll leave the rest of your comment, as I have no issues with it apart from the closing comment. Thanks for your time!
There is nothing like the fast development, replication, and webification that can be done in Domino. You have to know what you are doing. You have to use the @function language as much as possible because it is optimised by experts. Most people think they should use LotusScript for everything because it looks like VB, but it is much harder to do a good job. You can also use Java. I even wrote the odd servlet. The best thing was writing for the Web so nobody had to have the Notes client. This was great for international users.
The only thing that needed to be rebooted weekly in those days was the Windows NT servers. Anything that had HTTP running, even if not from Domino, would have a memory leak.
Whatever I had to do, I could do. The user community was great and you could always search the user group database to see if anyone had the solution. Most of the time other developers would have posted code. In return, I would look for questions I had the answers to.
The database format allows you to add a new field (like column) at any time without annoying anyone. It is there to be shown or not in form (screen) or view. You can create databases by importing data from other systems and making the fields visible on a form. The fact that it is not relational makes it very powerful. The lookup functions enable the use of "relational" restrictions; other rules can be built on the forms, just as in any other language.
Replication, and selective replication, enable different regions and even off-line users to have their own data and share it periodically. Replication also enables the developer to distribute code updates to production servers. It is a graceful and elegant system.
For real nightmares, try Exchange. It has a database too. If you want to recover a single document you have to have done a brick-level backup. And all it does is e-mail, and calendaring. The other bits are useless. If you need to write an application, you have VB, Access, etc. I have done that also -- and I STILL MISS DOMINO!
Is there any IBMer wanting to comment?
Sure. I'm happy to hear about this, but I probably won't use it. I quit using Notes about a year ago in favor of a small tool called "fetchnotes" that pulls my e-mail from my Notes server and drops it into my local mail spool, which I then read with whatever e-mail client strikes my fancy. I'm presently using Kontact, and it works very nicely. Calendaring works, except that my calendar isn't published on my Notes server so others can't look at it, but I can receive and accept/decline invitations and my local calendar is automatically updated and I can send invitations and the responses are automatically processed. It works very nicely.
What I may use this for is to access Notes databases. I try to avoid them whenever possible, though.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
There's nothing wrong with the architecture, it just CRASHES EVERY GODDAMNED DAY!
All the people who come out of the woodwork to defend Lotus Notes must either thrive on bloated software with horrible UIs, or be Notes developers. I'm guessing the latter.
Comment of the year
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Linux is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Linux community when IDC confirmed that Linux market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Linux has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Linux is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Linux's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Linux faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Linux because Linux is dying. Things are looking very bad for Linux. As many of us are already aware, Linux continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Ubuntu is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Ubuntu developers only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Ubuntu is dying.
All major surveys show that Linux has steadily declined in market share. Linux is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Linux is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Linux continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Linux is dead.
Fact: Linux is dying
Actually, he is referring to the fact that in Notes certain types of calendar related messages can be seen. Deleting that message inevitably deletes the function that message was serving. For example, if someone accepts an invitation to one of your meetings, that acceptance message is how Notes will determine the status of the invitation. If you keep the message that accepts the invitation, you can see that the person's status in the meeting is "accepted". If you delete the message with the acceptance, the status in the meeting invitation is "No response". The same situation can happen in a variety of scenarios where the user can see informationational messages and status messages are the same. However, while the criticism is pretty valid about the brain dead nature of such functionality the actual target of the criticism is rather misplaced. The problem is not in the design of Notes itself, but in the design of the mail template which shows such messages and allows them to be actually deleted (as opposed to just hiding it from the view). In the Notes environment, mail is simply a database application built in the Notes environment. It has both good and bad aspects, but the nice thing is you can fix it to work however you want. That, however, takes more skill than running an install wizard.
I hate lotus notes too... in fact I am using it where I work now, and just copied your post into a "memo" (I thought "email" was a sufficient term, but I stand corrected). After about 5 seconds of lag it pasted and destroyed my indentations. Add awful "memo editing" to the list...
IBM makes some cool stuff. We have a "lifeboat" CD that actually installs a redhat derivative over the network, and configures all the applications (notes included) and vpn. It is fairly slick, although it is really geared towards the average employee. At work (IBM) I run Ubuntu, some people run Fedora, and others Gentoo. Some of the highlights of IBM technology include one of the coolest printer config systems ever. It is amazing how easily you configure the printer via Firefox. I guess if I had a single complaint about the company it is our love of RPMs, but with alien all can be made right. The pre-release Notes client for linux is slow but they are working on it, in the meantime running it within Crossover Office is fine by me. I have never been told what to run at the office, I suppose if your manager didn't want you messing with Linux they could forbid it, but really don't mess with you unless you are infected with a virus, or running a switch or hub in your cube without manager approval. I have worked a few places and IBM is by far the most Linux friendly, excited about moving forward place I have been. I can't think of a day someone didn't talk about Linux, or how much they hate ATIs crap support for Linux.
As for Notes being a necessary evil,,, well I feel this is an issue that comes down to groupware vs email. If you are in the give me Pine or give me death camp, Lotus Notes is going to drive you mad. If you are in the Gmail camp Lotus Notes is likely to be your enemy. If you are an employee that lives and dies by a calendar, and meetings, then Notes is a friend. The UI arguments are more of a it could better, but most people will live with it and never know the difference.
I might want to go to the updated meeting. The person booking the meeting does not know it has not been sent to those that declined originally.
The weathers here - Wish you were beautiful
Don't hold your breath. Notes + Java. Does that SOUND like something that will be anything but resource hungry and sluggish?
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
That is the entire point with Notes. IF you use it for what it was designed for its a killer app. Problem is, in many companies someone uses Notes to do the Killer App thing and amazes the bejesus out of the suits and then suddenly they want to use the hot app it for EVERY thing.
Worst. Idea. Ever.
I am stuck in a development hell because a few years ag omy boss designed an app in Notes and I have to meintain it. I am soooo close to just sending the whole org to hell by leaving. the real problem with Notes is that
a) you cannot search your codebase
b) The development environment is horrifying. Especially the Java part.
c) The business logic and UI code are so intertwined it probably killed off the inventors of MVC by giving them massive simultaneous coronaries.
d) Dynamic queries into the database are pretty much non existent
e) Relations between documents??? Get real.
f) The UI system makes it a massive pain in the butt to get your formatting right.
However, despite all the whining Notes does not have such a bad UI. Not for DB work at least.
Point c) there is Notes's greatest strength and also greatest weakness. When the UI and Business logic are entwined it is very easy to buid quick one-off apps, and Notes really shines there.
On the other hand, writing a MAINTAINABLE app is a definite no-go.
Notes does haveother strengths
a) Disconnected database replicas are really really good
b) the Java/CORBA integration for external calls is very well implemented. It just works.
c) The UI is pretty ok when you have to deal with lots of documents (except you cannot click on a category header to select all the docs in it)
So it's a pro-con thing
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Indeed - I just didn't want to shoot the messenger :-)
We use a standard server setup for all of our servers. No, nothing Macafee touches them. Other applications—and there are a lot of them—seem to do fine, except for occasional glitches that all apps and servers have.
But not the Domino servers. Like I said, once a week. Like I said, I don't know why. The Notes team won't research it. Like I said, the reason we're always given is, "It's a Notes thing." Seriously. That's become a catch phrase for how much and why we hate our Notes support group around here.
To be fair, they're understaffed. There are only nine people supporting a huge application. Unfortunately, they spend the vast majority of their time fighting fires and don't have much time to troubleshoot what I think are fundamental problems with their application.
But...
Most of our other application teams (SAP a notable exception) are also understaffed, and somehow manage to keep their applications working fine. To me, from a management perspective (and yes, I'm both technical and managerial in my role), this says that either 1) we're unlucky and have nine really bad apples in our Notes support group (not true, I'd put it at two or so) or 2) there is something fundamentally wrong with the application that makes supporting it impossible. I think we have a winner in number two.
Do specific applications have problem running on servers with Lotus Notes? Probably, but that's taken into account. But we're not talking rocket science here. Every server is dedicated to the singular purpose of running Lotus Notes. The only other software we have installed on them are our standard monitoring tools (BMC Patrol), antivirus software (Symantec), and remote control software (pcAnywhere, since some of our Domino server are still running the version you can't administer via Terminal Services, the subject of a whole 'nother rant...). Like I said, every other application in our environment works fine with that suite of tools, and it's not like we haven't tried running Notes without those tools and it still failing. And it's not like every single company I have worked at with Notes hasn't had the same problems, they have.
And my rant was intended to be anecdotal. I'm not part of the Notes team, so I can't give details. I'm not directly on the server support team, so I can't go and troubleshoot the problem myself. All I can tell you is that from firsthand experience, every single Notes installation I've ever seen has been crap. At some point, you've got to stop blaming the individual installations and/or the people who did them and start looking at the one common factor: Lotus Notes.
And how funny. As I'm literally about to hit the submit button, I hear from some adjoining cubicles, "Is Notes down?..." "Yes, m09 is." "Ah crap, that's my server."
Typical. That's my server too. Looks like another fun-filled Notes kind of day.
Two words: Rich Text.
I tried for DAYS to get an e-mail with some words in bold, some in red, and with a table in it sent. I bought three books on developing applications in Domino. I'm not stupid, I've put together more little widgets for work than I can count. But I found this (what I consider) stupidly simple task nigh impossible.
Everything I read basically said something like, "To send an e-mail do this, this, this, and this. If you want to have formatting in it, well, that's a different type of message, and beyond the scope of this book."
Yes, that program was VERY usefull for notes v 4.x, ill repeat FOUR DOT X. The current version of Notes i 7.0.1, ill repeat SEVEN DOT ZERO DOT ONE.
You see the difference? Lets see how many of the programs you use haven't evolved since 1997?
Since v. 5.x the notes client has been stable - of course the underlying OS or a horrible programmed NSF app might not be.
J9 is a stripped down JDK that removes much of the less-oft used java library jars. It has different memory management. It's designed to give a java application a more acceptable footprint. I believe it was initially designed for mobile devices.
Whether that means it breaks the 'rules' of Java, I can't say. I can say that it is nice to have a java app that doesn't suck down tons of memory.
Blar.
It has much fewer libraries, different memory management techniques and other different features. Designed to greatly reduce the footprint of a Java application.
It is much easier to develop your code on the JDK you will be running it on.
Blar.
Notes crashed on me just an hour ago and I had to use Kill Notes to get it going again, lest I get the red rectangle of death. Or whatever IBM calls that thing. I wasn't using any databases except the ones IBM ships with the product to run their email system. Why did it crash? I had the pure audacity to click a file attachment-- can you believe that ballsy move?
Comment of the year
That may be true, but I'll venture it still hasnt anything to do with Notes.
Why? Having over 100 users who use the Notes client both at home and at work and not having a single user having issues with crashes in the Notes client kinda reassures you.
Of course the workplace desktops are pretty locked down so they cant mess them up, and a large part of the users have been converted to Firefox which also helps.
To put it plainly, it is most likely your windows setup that is screwed.
Let's say Notes is stable. Rock-solid... the horrible quality of the UI and slowness of the product would still make it a worse email client than Microsoft's Outlook or Entourage and Apple's Mail.app. (And possibly whatever the hell Novell's using now.)
Oh, and BTW, it crashes as much in MacOS X as well. So it can't be my "Windows setup" that is "screwed."
I'm sorry, the only thing I admit about Notes is that it's secure. Other than that, it's just a huge chunk of crap as far as I'm concerned.
What's your interest in defending Notes? Do you genuinely believe it's a good product? If so, have you ever spent a significant amount of time using a competitor's product? Or do you have a vested interested in Notes' success?
Comment of the year
I'm sorry to hear you had problems finding that info in the book. You should have looked at some more advanced book, or read the online help in Domino Designer.
The code would have been looking something like this:
dim db as NotesDatabase
dim maildoc as NotesDocument
dim rtitem as NotesRichtextItem
dim rtstyle as NotesRichtextStyle
set db = session.CurrentDatabase
set maildoc = New NotesDocument(db)
set rtitem = new NotesRichtextItem(maildoc,"Body")
Set richstyle = session.CreateRichTextStyle
Call rtitem.AppendText("The meeting is at ")
richstyle.Bold = True
Call rtitem.AppendStyle(richstyle)
Call rtitem.AppendText("3:00")
rtitem.Bold = False
Call rtitem.AppendStyle(richstyle)
Call rtitem.AppendText(" not 2:00")
call maildoc.Send(mailtoaddress)
Something like that. This is code for R5, in R6 you have even more rich text functionality, or you can use a 3rd party tool like Midas LSX to work with Rich Text...
Or you can do like I did a couple of weeks age, build the mail as HTML, with all teh formating you like, then import it into the body of the email programatically. piece of cake, if you kwno what you are doing and know the product.
It probably would take me 3 weeks to configure a Linux desktop like I want it to be/look/work. I may not even be able to do that without help from some expert. I don't say Linux sucks becuase of that...
Sorry for the late response, just drove 2000 miles with the family and noticed this response...
> OK, hotshot. What makes you think that Notes applications are nightmares in terms of maintenance?
Direct experience with in-house notes support teams struggling to support a small handful of applications on notes.
> Maintenance? Easy, because you have no DB schema to care about. Changes are much easier for the developer to handle, and don't
> require hours of extensive database maintenance - they're pretty much just a form change and perhaps a cleanup agent to remove any "retired" fields.
> Not only do I not see a maintenance nightmare, but I actually see a clear advantage.
That's an advantage in some terms of maintenance - everything is dynamic. But it's also a huge disadvantage to data quality: where the ability to dynamically change a schema also means that you generally lose the ability to get a consistent picture from the data across time. Some data has attribute x, some have y, some have z. It's much more useful (though more time-consuming) to keep everything consistent.
> And quantify your concerns on scalability, please.
Applications all over the world are growing in terms of data - our notes apps with a few gbytes of data were struggling to stay online. The kind of applications that php + db2/oracle could handle easily was killing notes.
> Data quality? In what sense?
In the sense that relational databases support declarative data quality enforcement - ensuring that the data is consistent across the database is generally very simple. Ensuring that any entered 'customer-id' actually exists is trivial in a relational database. Ensuring that the only disposition_codes allowed are 'prod','test','dev',trans' is trivial in a relational database. It wasn't trivial enough in notes - and so of course, didn't get done. The resulting data was a horror.
Then again, there were the times that users replicated old data to the central servers. Sometimes caused by old users replicating up, another time by an experienced admin trying to do a restore. Ick.
On one application we had to retype 100% of the data by hand to clean it up. Note that this was after we had implemented a LEI bridge to automate the export. We just had to give up entirely on it.
> Data quality? You've lost me. You're not one of those weird people who thinks all data should be relational, are you?
> I've never understood that. Some data and working processes lends themselves well to relational schemas. But most just don't.
> It's a restricting, cumbersome, maintenance intensive abstraction which is often unnecessary and just used out of habit.
No, most data fits best into a network model. But, unfortunately there are no great network modeling databases out there. Of the options we have we can immediately toss out hierarchical databases (and xml data storage) as a rehashing of previously discarded technology. The OODBMS has never been able to scale to handle simple scans - nor able to handle networks gracefully. The relational model scales well and also supports them adequately.
As far as non-network models - what has the scalability of a relational database? What products have survived as long? I've heard countless developers insist on something like java container-managed persistence in order to avoid lock in with relational technology. Guess what? ten years later relational databases will still be around, but two years later container-managed persistence was discredited and that company wanted to move from java anyway.
Relational technology isn't perfect, but it's unfortunately better than most other options today.
> Microsoft tried for years to get a relational database backend to the way we store data - it was called WinFS, and failed
> despite their massive resources.
So? they've also failed to create a secure os, does that mean it is impossible?
IBM created an os twenty year
Before my current position where i administer 5 domino servers and have about 1k mail users i was supporting 50 notes users and before that I was working in ITS for a hospital which used Exchange and Outlook (Outlook 97 at that time).
:)
:P
I do not have any certs on Domino, tho I expect I will be getting them later this year or early next year depending on what happens with a merger we are going thru (in which we need to decide on mail systems, tho the choice seems clear with 4 sys admins having Domino knowledge and 1 having Novell Groupwise knowledge).
I have 1 user who uses Notes on Mac OS X and it has some problems there - as such it doesnt crash but rather becomes "unreachable" in that you cannot give the notes app focus at some points, this is definitely a grievance and I sincerely hope the Hannover release will remedy that.
With regards to the Windows release I have yet to see the Notes 7.x clients crash, the Notes 6.0.x clients did crash on occasion, however 1-2 episodes for 100 client users during 6 months isnt what I would call unstable anyway,
Bloated - well it's a big app, and it definitely is (too) slow to start up. However its hardly as bloated as Adobe Reader
The mail interface IMO is fine - you need to get used to using f9 for update rather then f5 if you're going from outlook. Since Evolution uses f9 for update this works out fine for me
Of course some domino admins are slow to, or never update the database design for their users, which means that some users have a notes 4 design maildatabase running in a notes 7 client - needles to say that since most of the UI is in the database this will be pretty horrific - in fact I'm getting ready to upgrade a whole load of users from version 5 design to version 7 during august if possible (need to wait for the 7.0.2 client).
Once the client is loaded I dont see it as slow, if it seems like that for you, maybe your network has latency problems (if that is the case any client reading data of a server would have similar problems).
(sarcasm)Whats your vested interest in flaming notes?(/sarcasm)
Apologies for my late reply... Work has had a few power cuts and this has kept me busy. Thanks for your reply - it was informative, and I agree with some points on it and disagree with others.
;-)
:-(
I don't think you and I will ever agree on this subject, you know. We have fundamentally different experiences and views on this subject. Because of that, I'm not going to go into great detail point-by-point in my reply, as I suspect that we'd probably end up branching each point off multiple times, and Slashdot will close the discussion before we get even close to agreement.
Relational data storage has its place. But the gigabytes of documents that my organisation has would be a complete pain to put into any relational storage system. Some data just isn't well suited to being stored in an RDBMS. You're not ever going to convince me otherwise, because I've seen too many badly implemented RDBMS-stored systems that I'm as biased against them as you are against Notes applications. To me, RDBMS means high development costs, horrific maintenance, low distribution potential and therefore high single-point-of-failure.
I've also seen lots of very well implemented Notes applications. I've seen it used to deliver information worldwide within hours of the information becoming available. I've seen it handle complex workflow that eased the administrative burden considerably in organisations. And I've seen it crash and burn when people did stupid things with it.
Notes cannot be replaced by Wikis, or Ruby on Rails, or anything else out on the market. But you expected me to say that, and you're scoffing right now.
I find it saddening that you've not had a good experience with Notes. For me, it's one of the most fascinating, capable and resilient peices of software ever written.
In the geek community, I'm in the minority. In business, that's far more debatable - with 120 million licences sold, people must be seeing value in Notes somewhere. Sadly, not here on Slashdot.
> Open Office requires gjc in linux for 100% functionality, sun's jvm won't cut it.
That is 100% WRONG. In fact, Sun was getting flak for not supporting GCJ in OpenOffice.org a while back, so devoted some developer time to working around the incompleteness of GCJ. Sun's Java works absolutely fine with OpenOffice.org, and given that GCJ implements a subset of the Java spec while Sun's JVM implements the whole thing, I have no clue how ANYTHING could EVER find a way to require GCJ, unless you were just retarded and wrote something that depended bugs in GCJ's current implementation.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
Out of curiosity, what OS do most of the Lotus servers you manage run?
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
> I find it saddening that you've not had a good experience with Notes. For me, it's one of the most fascinating, capable and resilient :-(
> peices of software ever written.
> In the geek community, I'm in the minority. In business, that's far more debatable - with 120 million licences sold, people must
> be seeing value in Notes somewhere. Sadly, not here on Slashdot.
Yeah, it's a drag when you're really good with some product or technology, can really make it sing, know where the weak areas are and how to work around them - and then see that others look down their noses at it.
It's kind of how I feel when I talk to developers that dislike relational databases and want to use some kind of database encapsulation instead. They explain how bad databases are, and how much better their code is. I explain how they'll eventually want multiple products to connect to database - and SQL is the common language. How they'll eventually need to create reports, dashboards, portals - all using SQL. Possibly migrate some of their data to a warehouse for more powerful analysis - again, using SQL. And while SQL isn't the best language out there, it is very powerful and very common.
Good luck with notes though. Maybe something will happen and it'll get a great boost.
ken
As I said, that's wierd.
:-(
;-)
Notes can often be under-resourced, though. Funny thing is that a Domino server will often struggle on happily through the very worst of configurations. That's great for keeping a service available when something breaks unexpectedly, but not so great if it's all the time.
The other problem that makes Notes/Domino under-resourced is that it's often invisible to Management. They see either sexy new things or problematic old things, but never see MAJOR problems with Domino/Notes. In many shops I've seen, it's under-resourced simply because it sits there working and requiring far less attention than other products.
Sadly, it sounds like you either have a poor Notes team or an under-investment in the Notes infrastructure. Either way, that would kill just about any product, but I'll quit beating you over the head with that kind of statement now.
I hope it gets fixed soon!
Against my wishes, Windows. Mostly Windows 2000, but we're slowly upgrading them to 2003.
;-)
I'm probably more familiar with Windows myself. But Linux license costs would be cheaper, and Linux can have a much lighter memory footprint - which can affect your performance and capacity management. The only real bummer with Linux is the case-sensitivity in the filesystem, which would no doubt throw our less-able helpdesk staff and cause much confusion for a while. This is one of ths sticky parts that stops us from moving to Linux - that and training the helpdesk staff!
I've worked with Domino on Solaris, AIX, OS/400 and Linux in the past. My preference was Solaris, but that's probably because it had some beefy hardware underneath it in the implementation I worked on. The OS/400 was nice, but I didn't get a huge amount of time with it. It tends to just work on OS/400, for some reason.
Windows is definitely better in terms of layman-admin. That's a blessing and a curse. When I'm off, I get no questions asked about any platform issues - backups/restores go fine, for instance. With a *NIX OS, I just know that someone less able would get a restore request and just bounce it up to me because they couldn't figure it out or couldn't be bothered to.
On the other hand, the fact that anyone can get their grubby paws on my servers through the pretence of backups/restores or similar is a bane, too. More than once I've been investigating things that could have been avoided had people not done stupid things. At this level, it's all a training & procedures issue, really.
In terms of power, Windows is more powerful. If you can be arsed to learn WMI and use VBScript to write long, complex scripts, that is. Whereas Linux gives you powerful and easy tools like grep, asar, cat and so forth - plus piping! Yay!
Ironically, this means that I find that in basic systems management the Linux boxes are much easier, but you can do almost anything on Windows - if you want to be a programmer. Which is almost exactly the opposite of the normal view of the situation...
Heh. Thanks!
;-)
:-)
And, of course, somewhere out there there's a developer who's got a career of experience that tells him you're wrong, because he's seen too many apps that had their nuderlying DB changed - painfully, of course - often for no good reason.
Maybe someone decided that MS SQL's license cost was cheaper, or that Oracle would be faster, or whatever.
And had that developer had encapsulation, he feels he'd have been fine.
*sighs*
No two situations are alike. No one product or technique does it all. Sometimes, I get the feeling that if we could all just get used to that and work together, we'd rule the damned world like we're supposed to.
May your developers be smited when they suggest foolishness. And thanks for the new points of view!
Phil